Articles like this always intrigue me. They always point to a direction I'd hate to see consoles go. Fortunately they are always wrong.

In this case the CEO of Ubisoft envisions a future his current company is trying to build: a gaming ecosystem where everything is online, nothing is owned, companies may nickel and dime you to their hearts' content and pull the rug out from under you at any moment.

Companies have been going back & forth on this for decades. "Should we give everyone a dumb terminals & connect it all to a VAX, or should we buy IBM's new microcomputers?"

Lots of talk about bandwidth caps in the comments. Let's make something clear: your computer is connected to a wire which is connected to a data center. That wire & that data center can only handle so much information before things start to bog down. You won't get more data without paying more money to bury new cables and build more data centers. That will take time and money. Either everyone gets a larger bill, or the folks who use more than what the telcom company estimated the average user would use get to bare the cost. I'm not in favor of charging everyone for the few. Besides, bandwidth isn't really the problem; the problem's bad developers. Take a look at the source of that article; it shouldn't take that much code to display a picture & some text.

VideoGameCritic wrote:Even if bandwidth isn't a problem, latency will always be (physics). When people press a button they expect an immediate response. Anything less makes for a very poor gameplay experience.

Even modern displays always have _some_ latency compared with a CRT. It's why people struggle to beat Mike Tyson in MTPO on a modern flat screen when they can beat him easily on a CRT. But with most games you won't notice the latency as much.

I have no interest in cloud gaming. Though it does seem that MS is going that way with an announcement of going that way. Also talk between the lines of a new console in 2020 which could be a cloud console? I will not be buying it.

scotland wrote:One term being used is 'hardware agnostic', which makes sense.

It does but this has been tried before with the MSX and 3DO. It does make sense but there is an almost sports team like tribalism side to gamers that an agnostic system wouldn’t capture.

Haven't we already seen a lack of distinction with Sony and Microsoft systems? And Microsoft blurring the Xbox and the Xbox app on Windows 10? Plus browsers can access things like the Internet Archive to play retro games, but the emulator itself is not running on the browser itself.

You could still have tribalism, but software be hardware agnostic since the hardware is just the interface, like an old dumb terminal.